Super Smash Bros. Brawl in competitive play

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has had a very rocky history with regards to competitive play, as it is often considered the worst game in the series (although technically Smash 64 is worse, when you consider the release dates, and the development times, Brawl should be far better than it is in comparison to Smash 64). As such, although Melee still has a very strong competitive community to this day, Brawl's competitive community mostly died off shortly after the release of Smash 4.

Anti-Competitive features

Combos

One of the main issues regarding Brawl's competitive scene is the severe lack of any true combos in the game. This can be attributed to 3 main issues:

• Hitstun cancelling allows fighters to airdodge after just 13 frames (0.22 seconds) of hitstun, meaning that any followups that rely on hitstun lasting longer than this are never true combos.
• Significantly lower fall speeds make combos and juggling much harder to pull off.
• Moves generally seem to have more ending lag in this game.

As a result of this, the vast majority of the competitive gameplay revolves around very hard reads, and hoping that the opponent will make a mistake.

Slowness

Although the main contributing factor to the slow feel of the game is the lack of combos, the lower falling speeds, combined with generally lower movement options in general also cause the game to seem very slow. This makes the game generally less enjoyable to play or watch, further harming its competitive scene.

Balancing

The case could be made that all of the games in the Super Smash Bros. series have issues with balancing the fighter roster, but Brawl in notorious for having a very poorly balanced cast, most notably with Meta Knight and Ganondorf, the former being far to strong, and the latter being unusable due to being incredibly slow and having an awful recovery. It could even be argued that Ganondorf in Brawl is worse than Kirby in Melee.

Other Issues

• The game is overall much easier to master than Melee, which is usually harmful to a competitive scene.
• Random elements such as tripping also harm the competitive scene.
• Despite having a very large roster, many of the characters were clones, and others were really bad and frustrating to use, both casually and competitively.
• Many advanced techniques such as Light Shielding, L-Cancelling and Wavedashing were removed, although some new techniques, such as DACUS were added, slightly mitigating this.
• Many Multi-hitting moves had higher SDI multipliers added to them, making them very easy to escape.